Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Captain Thomas Weir, 7th Cavalry

Another interesting thing I read was that General Crook used private contractors to wrangle his mules/ pack trains.

I believe General Crook rode a mule.

Mike, I was referring to the treaties he worked out with the Southern Cheyenne after the Battle of Washita, not the fight itself.
What happened there, and at LBH for that matter, was the result of little or bad reconnaissance.
But he knew that the time required for reconnaissance would allow the Indians to escape.
Sorta damned if you do or damned if you don’t situation.
But he did get himself out of the jam by quick thinking .
Joel Elliot went off without Custer’s knowledge. By the time he realized that Elliot was missing there was nothing he could do. Elliot was probably dead by then anyway.
I have never heard of anyone holding him accountable other than Captain Benteen, and Benteen’s vendetta against Custer started before Washita.
Reon

A good article on Custer.

https://www.historynet.com/wounds-from-the-washita-the-major-elliott-affair/

I wouldn’t have liked him, but as I said earlier being congenial ain’t a prerequisite for (nor necessarily a hindrance to) success in battle. His courage had been proven many times and as far as I know he always led from the front, asking nothing of his men in combat that he wouldn’t chance himself.

Benteen never forgave Custer for actions that didn’t need forgiving. Elliott left on his own without Custer’s knowledge. At the point they were missing Elliot, Custer sent captain Myers to locate Elliott, which they didn’t. To escape an attack from other Cheyenne warriors from another camp downriver, Custer abandoned the idea to risk his immediate command and captured Indians, and sounded retreat.

This doesn’t support much of the criticism of abandoning a company in the field, as it was prudent to save the battalion over a lost and unauthorized contingent led by a zealous Major.

The Arabs in the Gaza Strip are copying Custer.

Off topic but on topic concerning Eastern Tribes at least abilities with firearms….

Ben Franklin 1755. Not many know he was given the charge of defending Pennsylvania’s NW Frontier during the F&I War.

https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page71.htm

It was well that we were not attacked in our march, for our arms were of the most ordinary sort, and our men could not keep their gun locks [flintlocks] dry. The Indians are dexterous in their contrivances for that purpose, which we had not.

Advance to the next page of the narrative and you’ll see his description of the construction of a frontier post. A good guy with axes could fell 60+ft 14” pine in six minutes.

For the next reference Google Cherokee rifle 1760 Fort Prince George.

The same day one of the soldiers was shot in the North-East Angle of the fort, from the hills on the other side of the river: He died of the wound yesterday.

We have reason to believe the Indians have a good many rifle-barreled guns among them, as their bullets seem to come this way with great force.

.
I don't doubt that some indians at LBH were good marksman.

.
Here's documentary from 2021 that some here have probably seen.
It's a paid-for thing....I couldn't find any free streams to post.
I'll say up front that some of the acting isn't that great IMO, but overall it gets a good rating from the reviewers.
The script seems to try to stick with what has been reported in the after-action interviews.
.
https://www.strategyofdefeat.com/

Indian imbecility with guns is one of the more persistent of our pop history norms, about as strong as the presentation of Indians as friends of the Earth.

Tying things together, James Smith, who lived five years among the Mohawk and became a Frontier Militia leader pointed out that the Eastern Woodland Indians highly coordinated and disciplined ambush tactics were related to their practice of mass deer drives, often at night. Deer were shot in large numbers solely for their hides. I don’t have the reference but the Cherokees alone brung in 145,000 deer hides to British traders in Savannah in 1744.

At the Fort Pitt Museum in Pittsburg they state that 298,000 bucks (“buck” being the term for a deer hide, later becoming slang for money) were brought in, mostly by Delawares, in one year.

In return among other things the Indians had the capital to buy those expensive smallbore longrifles so economical on lead and powder, said economy important when you live a long way from the supply. The people at americanlongrifles.org point out that as the main provider of hides and furs at the time, the Indians would have much use for these rifles.

Having owned and shot both, I’ll take a 20 ga smoothbore trade gun over a rifle anyday. Loaded carefully, you can still get minute of deer out past 70 yards and it’s a far more versatile arm for feeding people and in a combat situation can be loaded faster and longer before it fouls out. But I’m not rationing small amounts of lead to take large numbers of deer.

Neither apparently were the settlers in Upstate New York where NO records of settlers owning rifles can be found, whereas at the time of the Rev War about half the firearms owned by their Iroquois neighbors may have been rifles (based on their own post-war loss claims to the Brits in Canada).

So when our longhunters headed out after hides and furs in their turn, they dressed and armed themselves like Indians, for the same reasons.

Stanley Vestal (the pen name of Walter S. Campbell) wrote an article on the subject of Indian marksmanship in GUNS Magazine.

"The Indians were all armed with repeaters," is one
claim made about the Custer massacre. Of major interest
then is the matter of how many Indians had repeaters and
the answer is, not many. Numbers and time defeated Cus-
ter. More than 1,000 fighting Indians were battling on
the bluffs June 25-26 in 1876 when Yellow Hair went down.
But the number of soldiers engaged was only 204. Only
16 Indians were killed, while the 204 were wiped out by
superior numbers.

Major Reno in the Big Horn bottoms had his hands full
June 25 with another 1,000 Sioux. About 150 soldiers
stood off repeated attacks of nearly ten times that number
of Indians. Eight Indians were killed; 32 whites. Two
Indians were known to be wounded, for seven soldiers shot.
But it was not a massacre, and Reno's outfit survived the
assault. In the battle of the Rosebud on June 17, 1876,
1,000 Indians and 1,300 whites fought. With more even
odds, the casualties were nearly even. Ten white men and
eleven redskins bit the dust. Five Indians were wounded;
21 whites.



HOW GOOD WERE INDIANS AS SHOOTERS?

.
Yet others would say that Custer was defeated not merely by superior numbers, but that he was out-maneuvered.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what factors, other than sheer numerical superiority, led to the Indian victory at the Little Bighorn on 25 June 1876, and demonstrate that the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors outperformed the 7th Cavalry in all war-fighting functions during the battle. In the final analysis, it is reasonable to assume the Indians numerical superiority made a 7th Cavalry victory impossible they were not in a position to drive the Indians from their village and burn it, as they had at the Washita River. However, considering the soldiers and firepower that Custer had at his disposal, the complete annihilation of his force cannot be accepted as a foregone conclusion. If the Indians had been a disorganized mass of savages, Custer possessed the combat power to fight his way out or establish a successful perimeter defense as Captain Benteen and Major Reno did. The reason he was not able to accomplish either course of action owes to the fact that the 7th Cavalry was tactically outperformed during the Battle of the Little Bighorn the unrelenting pressure of the Indian attacks caused Custers five companies to lose the discipline, organization, and control that might have saved them. The popular American perception that Custer was defeated only because of the sheer number of warriors engaged in the fighting completely ignores the superb leadership and tactical prowess that ensured an Indian victory and, therefore, cannot be accepted as inevitably leading to the massacre of Custer and his entire command. Such an erroneous view detracts from the true nature of the Indian victory and discounts the leadership, martial prowess, and valor the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors displayed in their annihilation of Custer and his five companies a victory that has become an integral and important part of American history in general and the U.S. military tradition in particular.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA401397

Wow! Guns, December 1956, the ads and articles got me all nostalgic and I wasn’t even there Great link.

Of course, taking the side that Indians were good with firearms I approve of his conclusion (tho I dunno the stats he posts are definitive either way):

Man to man, too often the Indians matched the whites’ firepower superiority with brains, cunning and straight shooting and won. With the few guns they had the Indians could shoot well.

I will observe that he was speaking of Plains Indians. A century earlier both Indians and White observers remarked that the Woodland tribes long in proximity to the settlement line “had forgotten the use of the bow”, meaning they did most all their shooting with firearms so of necessity must have had a bunch.

Adding to their competency with weapons and their fieldcraft skills (up until the very end of the Frontier Era we were finding Indian scouts were necessary to track down Indians), ya gotta throw in the feats of physical endurance common to Indian warfare.

One of the 1830-40’s stories about the legendary Texas Ranger Jack Hays is that he was out on foot hunting with a party of (rifle armed) Delaware Indians when one of their party was killed by a passing Comanche War Party.

In response the Delawares, accompanied by Hays, ran non-stop two days straight on the trail of the mounted Comanches and on the third morning took the Comanche camp by surprise.

Jack Hays was undoubtedly an exceptional fighting man, but I dunno that he would have the physical conditioning and childhood raising to run two days straight. No one doubts that the Delawares did tho.

Populate the Frontier with Indians like that, and the deeds of our guys actually able to operate in that environment become even more impressive.

That is a wonderful thesis but just that.
Indians are famous for individuality and resourcefulness. Fighting with tenacity and bravery is not the same as under control and command.

Indians did have the man power, more so when the Benteen and Reno groups were pinned down. The natives were better rested as were their mounts making them far more fluid. Natives lived a hard life dealing with any edge they could get. If they could circle, flank, move to a better position to shoot of course they did. They could spot the chance and didn’t need to be commanded. At LBH when this happened it wasn’t 10 or 20 moving to flank you, it was 100-200. That makes a real time difference in seconds considering the onslaught of bullets and arrows from a new direction.

Pretty hard for an uncontrolled retreat to deal with all that, plus the fact that the entire area of the hi ground the battle was on wasn’t what one would hope defensively.

Osky

Interesting thread. I’ve sometimes wondered how well the Indians could shoot.

My guess is that the Indians had less access to gunpowder, ammo, gun cleaning supplies, or smiths so they probably didn’t spend as much time shooting outside of hunting. That’s just an assumption. Maybe they could afford to easily trade for gunpowder or ammo. At any rate many of them would have handled a rifle constantly and probably fired at least a few shots daily I would think.

Another factor for plains Indians might be wanting to fly under the radar and not wanting to be heard doing a lot of extended shooting if they didn’t have to. It would seem like the whites from settled areas back East, the South or even relatively settled areas on the plains would be able to afford more ammo for recreational shooting and would have the time to do it when not farming and without fear of being located by enemy combatants.

By the end of the frontier days a lot of the men moving West had fought in the Civil War and had grown up in the South so I would think that a lot of them had considerable trigger time.

I don’t know how much if any of that played a role in how well the various players on the plains could generally shoot it’s just guessing on my part.

“Like water swirling around a stone”
It was simply overwhelming numbers, and every minute there were less solders to fight back and “their shots quit coming”.

From my reading on this subject, I think most historians are saying that about half of the Sioux and Cheyenne had firearms of some type.
Everything from old muzzleloaded trade guns to modern Henry’s and Winchesters, and revolvers.
Some were no doubt very good shots, but I doubt the majority got much trigger time.
Remember the orderly laughing at the lousy Indians shooting on the withdrawal from Weir Point.
Reon

Knowing hard it starts becoming to ram a patched ball down my flintlock after the second shot a smooth bore sounds appealing to me too

Most original rifles did have coned bores to facilitate loading. And, you might be surprised just how well your rifle shoots w/o a patch or with just a wad to hold ball in place.

Good info 👍

Thanks for posting that link to Guns magazine. I just ordered a 7mm Mauser from Golden State and an anti-tank rifle from Hunters Lodge. Hope they still have them in stock.